Samat Says Samat Jain's personal weblog

In the shadow of my Flickr userstyle that adds black borders around photos, is another more simple one. Now on userstyles.org, Use a monospaced font for the AwesomeBar (aka the URL bar, URL field, etc).

This isn’t that original or clever, as it’s actually included in userChrome-example.css contained in most older Firefox user profiles. However, this file is no longer included with new profiles as of Firefox 3.5, so it’s a bit more difficult to discover.

Add black borders around photos on Flickr. It’s a userstyle for use in Stylish, a Firefox extension that lets you apply custom CSS to webpages.

In the past, I generally not made weblog entries about creations like this, but it’s never too late to start.

Today, Adobe released 64-bit Flash for Linux. Finally, I can waste time watching ugly, pixelated Internet video on my 64-bit Linux desktop and laptop, just like all of my 32-bit-confined brothers and sisters on the Internet! (Yes, I know about npviewer—let’s not go there.)

What’s really interesting is that this is Adobe’s first 64-bit release of Flash. That is, Linux users got it first, before users of Windows Vista x64 and and MacOS X. It probably does not mean anything, especially since Adobe has mentioned 64-bit flash will be released at the same time across platforms, but you can’t help but feel good inside.

Go download it now and remember to report good bugs.

Update: Some quick notes…

• The tarball provided on the labs website is not the conventional Adobe Flash installer–it just contains the plugin. To use the plugin, drop the .so file into your ~/.mozilla/plugins/ directory.
• Make sure to uninstall your npviewer-powered 32-bit Flash completely (disabling the plugin within Firefox is not enough). I personally uninstalled it from my system to prevent any conflict.

Dell Ideastorm is a Dell-run website where users can post and vote (anonymously) for ideas for Dell products. What’s the number one thing people want…?

People want Linux on their Dell machines. Remember to click the “promote” icon and make your vote count.

Peter Gutmann, a cryptography expert at the University of Auckland, has written a Cost Analysis of Windows Vista, where he discusses how the “content protection” and trusted platform features described in the Microsoft Windows Vista “security” specification will destroy reliability and innovation in the computer hardware industry, as well as make life miserable for us, the users.

Doomsday scenarios like this were brought up when Microsoft Windows XP was about to be released, and though it was enough to make me switch away from Windows to Linux, most of the concerns did not materialize. I don’t know if Vista will be any different of a situation, but if the notion that they definitely want this kind of control (irrespective of whether they can actually do it, or whether the market will let them) doesn’t make anyone who enjoys using their computer want to switch, I don’t know what will.

Former id games mapper, and creator of the classic 3rd person game Alice, American McGee has switched to Ubuntu Linux.

Ubuntu Linux only gets more and more popular…

Over at the Plone Blog is the article Death and Taxonomies; it reviews Drupal’s taxonomy (aka category) system.

The author basically comes to the conclusion I have, a conclusion that is shared by many in the Drupal community but not so much outside of it: Drupal’s taxonomy system is amazing.

For most people and their uses, it is completely overengineered and complicated to use. This fits into Drupal’s marketing stance that it is a content management framework rather than just a CMS. It is very generic, and with some custom programming can be adapted to anything–the possibilities are limitless. With many web development projects (that I don’t want to write in PHP) I think about, I wish I had the facility of Drupal’s taxonomy system.

Of course, there are problems, which the review goes into: there are too many hierarchal relationships in Drupal, all competing with each other. There is the menu system, the book module, and hierarchal taxonomies. The key to being a Drupal master is know when to use which and how to use them, something I’ve definitely not mastered. And that is part of the problem–why should you need to?

I’ve outlined some of the design decisions I made when designing Sands, including why some links are black, the use of a em-relative layout, and why I think they are more usable, in a post on Drupal’s forums: Any theme with high usability?

Beyond Unreal has some ridiculously high-resolution Unreal Tournament 2007 screenshots from E3 2006. Well, they’re not that high resolution–the images are just large.

The vehicles look cool. I was excited about Epic’s Unreal Engine 3 before, and right now it’s safe to say I’m excited by the Unreal Tournament 2007 title too. Yes, graphics is not everything… but if Unreal Tournament 1999 and Unreal Tournament 2003/2004 are any indication, Epic certainly understands how to deliver gameplay.

Gentium, called the “typeface for the nations,” is a nice serif font. It does not look particularly great on-screen, but on paper, it is absolutely beautiful.

The Gentium samples page includes some pictures, as well as a a PDF containing a history of Gentium. Again, they don’t do the font justice on-screen: print the PDF and just stare at how beautiful it is.

One of it’s nice properties is that it’s approximately the same size as Times New Roman, point for point. That is, a document typeset in Times New Roman and one typeset in Gentium will be the same length when printed. Because of this, Gentium is a great alternative to Times New Roman, because even with similar sizing, Gentium’s glyphs appear bigger, and are much easier to read.

Did I mention it is Unicode? No, it doesn’t have the entire Unicode character set… but no doubt it one day will.